It is with regret that the Bulletin notes the recent closing of the Industrial Museum of the American Steel and Wire Company at Worcester, Massachusetts.

The current importance of labor administration in business highlights the need for a better understanding of the historical background of the relations of business and labor. No part of American history has been more inadequately handled. Three aspects of the history of labor have been emphasized above everything else: labor organization, the conflict of labor and employer, and “exploitation” of labor by business. This approach has tended to engender conflict rather than to promote understanding.

Perhaps the most significant thing about the business man in folklore is that he is far from an important figure in it. From this we may deduce that among those people who have created what we call folklore the business man has either not played an important rôle or his function and contribution have not been understood. He is not, however, altogether missing; we might not recognize him, since he is a remote and shadowy figure compared with the business man as we think of him today. But he is there, and the very form and circumstances in which he appears have meaning.

The New York Metropolitan area contains a greater volume of important business records than any similar section of the United States; yet up to some three years ago little had been done by the historical profession to encourage the preservation of the records for scholarly use. Some New York business records have been deposited from time to time in the local university libraries, the New York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Public Library, where the former Director, H. M. Lydenberg, made occasional efforts in this direction. Through members of the Business Historical Society, and others, the attention of the Baker Library had sometimes been directed to New York records; but all of these efforts together have barely ruffled the surface of the vast mass of papers reposing in vaults, private libraries, and storage warehouses.

In the days of the gilds, when a master craftsman hired half a dozen journeymen to work for him and became the capitalist of his time, one of his chief assets was skill at his trade. The industrial revolution left this petty capitalist as helpless as a museum piece so far as ownership of the tools of production was concerned, but it could not relegate to the showcase his outstanding characteristic, innate manual skill. The later age translated skill into mechanical ingenuity. Machines might turn out the finished product with an unskilled machine operator at their side, but back of the machines were mechanics with machine-wise fingers, and finally mechanical engineers with a creative sense. By means of the same ability which turned the old-time craftsmen into proprietors of production, the skilled mechanics of yesterday have evolved into industrial capitalists.

In July, 1936, the Burlington inaugurated a policy of making its historical records available to qualified scholars by depositing, in the Baker Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, all the records that could be found (some six tons in bulk) pertaining to the sale and colonization of its land grants in Iowa and Nebraska; a few years later similar material for the Hannibal & St. Joseph was added to this collection, thereby making it the most complete of its kind in the United States.

If the whole history of American experience in establishing and operating manufacturing ventures were recorded, the number of failures would probably be found to be prodigious. Countless communities on rivers, large and small, dreamed of the time when the hum and whir of machines would bring them wealth, and many such communities actually set up factories.

A book has recently appeared which is evidently the first volume of The Growth of Business Series to be published by the Columbia University Press.

The attention of the readers of the Bulletin was in the April issue directed to an address by Dr. Stanley Pargellis on the subject. “The Judgment of History on American Business.” The address, which was published by the Newcomen Society, American Branch, and also by the Railway Age and The Nation's Business, has evoked much stimulating discussion. A letter is printed below that comments on Dr. Pargelhs' address and carries the discussion further. It emphasizes a fundamental aspect of the problem, and in effect it challenges the scholar to an examination of his own thinking about business. The BULLETIN presents the letter as the statement of a business man who has thought much about the problem.

Before the next number of the Bulletin is issued, members of the Society will receive a copy of the latest volume in the Harvard Studies in Business History. The book is entitled the Development of Two Bank Groups in the Central Northwest: a Study in Bank Policy and Organization.

Various religions have been critical of the business man or even hostile to him. Christian writers have crudely called him the “rich man.” The Old Testament set the fashion, but not with a single voice. The New Testament is more emphatic, even if not uniformly opposed to enterprise, efficiency, and success.